On Dec. 14, 1918, a month after the armistice was signed ending the first world war, The Courant ran a story on Page 1 reporting the miraculous effect the war's conclusion seemed to have on thousands of mentally wounded warriors.

"SHELL SHOCK SOLDIERS CURED BY PEACE NEWS," the headline declared, above a story reporting the gleeful Senate testimony of Surgeon General Merritte Weber Ireland, who recounted the fate of American soldiers being treated in France.

Of 2,500 soldiers with "shell shock," Ireland told the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, all but about 300 were immediately restored to health by news of the armistice.

"It was the greatest experience in psycho-therapeutics known," he told the committee.

But Ireland's optimism would not be borne out.

In the years and decades that followed, The Courant carried repeated tales of the war's continued effect on the psyche of those who fought, from men too unnerved to hold a steady job to the hopeless few who took their own lives.

Ireland, and the rest of the medical community, didn't understand the neurology behind shell shock, which would later come to be known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Perhaps more noteworthy than the psychological naivete of the time was the surprisingly enlightened coverage given so long ago to the mental casualties of war — coverage that would later give way to skepticism toward the disorder and its victims.

Since the Vietnam War, veteran advocates have spent decades pressing the Pentagon and society to recognize the mental effects of war and the scope of PTSD. As suicides mounted in Iraq and Afghanistan, all branches of the military launched campaigns aimed at reducing the enduring stigma that has made it difficult for service members to seek mental health care. Activists see progress, but say that the nation still does too little to support soldiers in crisis at a time when 22 veterans commit suicide every day.

But nearly a century ago, The Courant and other newspapers openly covered the stress of war as a national tragedy, telling sympathetic stories of victims and providing a mouthpiece for those demanding action from government.

"I strongly advocate the establishment of a hospital in Connecticut to be devoted to the treatment of ex-service men suffering from mental disorders. There are still a sad number of these cases," Thomas Bannigan, a vice national commander of the American Legion, told The Courant in August 1921.

Three years later, The Courant devoted nearly an entire news page to a story headlined "HOW WAR WRECKS THE HUMAN MIND," which noted that one-third of hospitalized veterans were being treated for "mental and nervous troubles."

"When the war first got under way, certain bigoted members of the medical profession believed that mental sufferers were malingerers and that the only effective treatment was that of the firing squad," a Courant reporter wrote 90 years ago. "When the mental physician came on the field, the true nature of mental trouble was given a searching examination."

Even as World War I raged, individual cases of stricken soldiers made news. "SHELL-SHOCK VICTIM VISITS DOCTOR HERE" was the headline on an Oct. 15, 1917, story in The Courant reporting that William Hayden, a gunner in the Eighth Canadian Artillery, was recuperating at the home of a doctor on Tremont Street in Hartford "after severe shell shock which left him in a rather nervous condition."

Just weeks before the war ended, The Courant reported that Monica Brock, a nurse from Plainfield, had died from the stress of war. "She was shell-shocked and a physical wreck when returned to this country in October," the paper wrote. And by the end of November, she was dead, and given a funeral with military honors.

Although "shell shock" quickly became, and remains, a generic term for traumatic stress, it initially was used literally, coined by physicians who believed that psychological symptoms in soldiers were caused by the concussive impact of a nearby exploding shell. That explanation was the latest in a long effort to label the difficult-to-understand emotional toll of war.

During and after the Civil War, doctors spoke of "soldier's heart" and made a formal diagnosis of "nostalgia," believing that psychiatric problems could be explained by the difficulty in adapting to unfamiliar surroundings.

In 1898, The Courant reported on the "strange case" of a Massachusetts soldier who was said to have died of nostalgia. "The fact that nostalgia as a disease is rare, being an acute form of melancholia, especially induced by simple homesickness, and is but seldom fatal, has led to much conjecturing among the medical men."

After the first world war, however, scientists believed that the conjecturing was over. "The end of the war marked an acceleration of mental hygiene in Connecticut," The Courant wrote in 1924. "The point that physical ill health is often caused by mental ill health was now understood by physicians, and psychiatry came into its own."

That progressive attitude didn't resonate with George S. Patton, the legendary general who commanded the Seventh United States Army during World War II, when the term "shell shock" gave way to "combat fatigue" and "battle fatigue."

In 1943, Patton was touring an evacuation hospital in Sicily when he came upon Pvt. Charles Kuhl, who said he was being treated for a nervous condition. "You mean you're malingering here," Patton sneered, before slapping Kuhl in the head.

The incident earned Patton a reprimand from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. But Patton didn't back down. "My action was entirely correct," he later wrote, "and had other officers the courage to do likewise, the shameful use of battle fatigue as an excuse for cowardice would have been infinitely reduced."

In time, "battle fatigue" was retired, and psychiatrists spoke of "Vietnam syndrome" and eventually post-traumatic stress disorder, which affected hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but would not be formally accepted as a psychiatric diagnosis until five years after the fall of Saigon.

"Nightmares Linger for Vietnam Veterans," The Courant wrote in a 1981 headline, which would be followed by decades of covering the mental scars of that war.

Military leaders pledged to heed the lessons of Vietnam in caring for soldiers' mental health. But the pages of The Courant reveal how stubborn the problem is, from a 2006 series on lapses in mental health screening and treatment for troops, to a steady stream of stories on increases in crime, health problems and suicide linked to war trauma.

More than 75 years after extolling the lessons learned in World War I and proclaiming that the advent of the "mental physician" had transformed military health care, the newspaper editorialized that the work was still incomplete:

"America has spent billions of dollars training soldiers for combat," The Courant wrote in a 2010 editorial, "but has paid too little attention to the psychic aftermath, which can cripple veterans for decades."